JANE PICKERSGILL
Above: Still from Sculpture in a Setting, Tacita Dean (2017)
Still Life is one of a trilogy of shows awarded to Tacita Dean in 2018 by 3 major institutions. These address the primary genres of art – Landscape, (opening in May at the R.A.) Portrait, at the N.P.G. and this show in which she curates the gallery collection alongside her take on what makes a still life?
Most interesting for me was the dialogue between the diptych Ideas for Sculpture in a Setting made at Henry Moore’s estate with the Paul Nash work Event on the Downs . The works seem to preface the Landscape exhibition (yet to open) as they explore the boundaries of the Landscape and Still Life genres. This intersection currently forms part of my practice research.
Still Life - Tacita Dean - National gallery (2018)
Above: Event on the Downs, Paul Nash (1934)
Below: Grave Group from a Bell Barrow at Winterslow, Thomas Robert Guest (1814)
Dean’s diptych shows objects so close to the lens they become a foreground texture of ‘rock’ blocking out a natural landscape viewed beyond, and through, voids. Scale is ambiguous and the ‘rock object’ could be monumental, a maquette, or a piece of found flint. The object seems to be the observer of the landscape, the perpetual time defying megalith in front of which the scudding clouds and other ephemeral events such as changes in shadows pass by. The film has the air of a black & white art movie from the 1950’s.The oversized tennis ball in the Nash painting may also symbolize the ‘eye’ of an observer. Aside from the ball the painting’s focus is on a tree stump and a cloud with a similar silhouette. The cloud is not painted realistically and could as easily be a piece of chalk picked up on the beach below the distant white cliffs. The subject is clearly that of ‘silent watching’.
A similar emotional tone is maintained in two paintings by Thomas Robert Guest painted more than a century earlier than Nash. The paintings show us excavated archaeological objects in the foreground of a landscape rather than in an interior setting, as we are used to seeing them.
The challenge to the viewer is to liberate the still life from its interior 'cage' and set it free to roam outdoors and vice versa. Dean's ambiguity towards genres is evidenced by a nearby piece in which she has meticulously constructed a tiny shelf within a box frame; upon this is displayed a postcard reproduction of a landscape painting. Thus the landscape painting has been photographed and turned into an object which has subsequently been transformed into a still life tableaux.
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